The marriage of Figaro and Susanna is imminent. However, when Figaro learns that his betrothed is being courted by another, a dangerous game of intrigue and exposure begins. The extent to which the work’s protagonists are caught up in a dense web of emotional dependency becomes ever clearer. In Le nozze di Figaro [The Marriage of Figaro] Mozart shows that it is love that sometimes inflicts the deepest wounds – and that healing is only available to one prepared to offer himself to the other in total surrender. This opera, first performed in 1786, deals with a timeless theme: the both confusing and fascinating complexity of human relationships.

The thriller on the Seine. The suffering, death and glorification of a mother, whose child has been taken from her. And, as a Satyr play, the confidence trick by the shiftiest legacy hunter of the Middle Ages. Three self-contained operas with seemingly unconnected narratives. But are they? Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi – the three one-acters which Giacomo Puccini merged under the art-historical title of “The Triptych” – are snippets of reality. Instead of trying and failing to portray the world in its entirety in a long opera, similar to an epic novel, he gives prominence to three historical events, united in one piece of music, which seek to convey authentically every nuance of human emotion from ruthless coldness of heart to burning passion.

What happens to love when it is besieged on both sides – by politics on the one side and family loyalties on the other? And what if both these forces are fatefully and inextricably linked? In his grand opéra Les Vêpres siciliennes Giuseppe Verdi takes a no-holds-barred look at these questions, presenting the two lovers Hélène and Henri. Even as their wedding bells are still pealing, they fall victim to a massacre resulting from the irreconcilable enmity between Sicilians and their French occupiers. Love demonstrates no utopian powers.

And yet, Verdi’s enthralling composition draws its listeners in and keeps the audience on the edge of their seats.

„The House of the Dead“ – the moniker accorded to the Siberian labour camp by those held within it: thieves, killers, political prisoners. This is a place in which captives are incessantly monitored and punished. With its very own rules involving power and submission; its hierarchies and bullying by those in authority; this is a place far from civilisation, which acts both as its blind spot and its mirror. Based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The House of the Dead, in which the author processes his own four-year incarceration, Leoš Janáček created a singular work of musical theatre. This is an opera without heroes; without the standard plot revolving around conflict and its subsequent resolution. Against a backdrop of the tedium and gruelling routine of camp life, Janáček allows individual prisoners and their stories to emerge briefly from the multitude. He draws out personal journeys marked by humiliation and abuse. Janáček’s unique musical idiom feels like eavesdropping and provides a raw, gestural expression for the brutality faced in the camp, but also for the moments of shared hope, compassion and solidarity.

Neither balsam, nor medicinal herbs can provide relief to the wounded and ailing Amfortas, ruler of the Grail kingdom. His path to recovery proves to be a complex one. No member of the Grail community can reclaim the spear which inflicted the wound, but only an outsider, a “pure fool”, enlightened by compassion. Only by the tip of this spear touching Amfortas’s wound can he be healed. On his journey of self-discovery, towards his destiny as chosen deliverer, Parsifal is accompanied, not only by the skilful Grail Knight Gurnemanz, but also by the enigmatic and seductive Kundry, who opens his eyes to sensuality and extrasensory experience.

Parsifal, a „Bühnenweihfestspiel“ („A Stage Inauguration Festival Play“), was first performed in Bayreuth in 1882. Richard Wagner’s final musical drama addresses wounds which fester both within individuals, as well as in society as a whole, before proffering miracle remedies with the ability to ease the pain„

This knight is no war hero; choosing to pursue his obsession, rather than to fight. Orlando, the illustrious crusader from Ariost‘s verse novel Orlando furioso, is in love with Angelica, though she is betrothed to another. In his erotomania, he presents a both unintentionally funny and tragic figure. Joseph Haydn described his (at that time) most internationally successful opera from 1782 as a dramma eroicomico; this categorisation already suggests what the composer, as he sat in his opera laboratory at the Palace of Esterházy, was interested in: namely, in taking seriously and musically exploring the depths of human existence in all its brokenness, regardless of how bizarre this might appear.